


Pillars

by meanderingsoul



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Confessions, Crying, Dark, Devotion, Disturbing Themes, Doubt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hugs, Insecurity, Season/Series 05, Self-Worth Issues, Sharing a Bed, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 16:27:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14084937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: It wasn’t anything May hadn’t thought a thousand times, when she’d heard he was dead, at his funeral, when she’d been told he was alive, when he was losing his mind to alien compulsions, a few days ago hearing he was dying.Her heart still lurched in her chest to hear him justsayit like that.





	Pillars

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags please. Fic is set near 5x13. No spoilers for 5x14.

 

It was getting to be a routine for May to prowl the halls whenever Fitz or another tech announced the portal thing was acting up.

Space travel was one thing. She could officially pilot a spacecraft now, but dimensional travel was above her paygrade. Fitz had some process of elimination set up, something to do with what he’d seen after the accident at the old Momentum labs and something else to do with where Reyes had said the Rider had said the Darkhold had come from and all of it was so far past the level of physics she understood it might as well be from Star Wars.

There was nothing for her to do right now and it was driving her crazy.

There was only so much PT she could do while the leg muscle was still healing. Piper didn’t have the level of anger May was dealing with coming to her. She’d been _so damn stupid_ , but not malevolent. They didn’t have any intel on the masked fighter who’d butchered Elena, so May couldn’t work on tracking her down to kill her. And the only thing she could do right now for the thing it was taking all her energy not to think about was wait, and that just made her more pissed off.

It’d be kind of nice to get to just shoot something that wasn’t allowed to be here.

Phil ducked out of a hallway ahead of her and grinned. “Well hey there. Scenic walk?”

“Not so scenic yet. Seen anything interesting?” He must be doing the same thing she was. There wasn’t much for him to work on right now either. Most of the Shield they’d rebuilt had been dissolved into other agencies while they’d been in the future.

It hurt more than she’d thought it would.

“No Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man yet,” he teased, ducking into a different hallway and leaning against the wall.

She followed, let her shoulder thump against the wall next to his and grinned up at him. It was so much easier to smile these days, even with everything else.

“It’s been nice to see you more like your old self,” he said.

That stung a little bit for some reason, but she still smiled at him because he was here with her and still breathing and she still had time to keep him that way.

“We’ve had a good run in a lot of ways, yeah? We’ve worked well,” Phil said.

She wanted to snap at him not to talk like his situation was inevitable, but she didn’t want to talk about that at all even more. So May took the _other_ option they had now, glanced up through her lashes a little and flirted, “Just work?”

“I think work was the biggest part of it, don’t you?”

That hurt, but he probably hadn’t meant it like that. “I don’t know. We’ve been through a lot. Together.”

“Yeah, you’ve always been there for me May. Well, always except for when it _really_ would have counted I guess,” he said waggling his left fingers and a wry expression on his face like that was almost a joke.

If she hadn’t been leaned against the wall she’d have reeled back. “Phil I…”

“I know, I know. There were other priorities. That’s just the way it is with us.”

He didn’t say it wasn’t her fault. She knew he’d said that before, but they’d only talked about it once. Maybe he hadn’t really meant…

“You know I wish I’d been there,” she said quietly.

He shrugged. “Morse needed extraction. And I doubt one more body would have made much of a different with Gordon.”

It wasn’t _untrue_.

Phil just didn’t usually say it like that, like it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been with him or not. But that was just her letting the mission get too personal. It was Phil’s job to put the strategy first, always had been. It shouldn’t sting.

He sighed. “I suppose sometimes it just gets to me.”

“What does?” Something was weighing on him. Obviously. Something besides his injury. And it meant a lot that he always came to her. Not a lot of people found her comforting. Sure, plenty of agents over the years had associated her with their safety, but this was different.

“That all of this really could have been avoided I guess, but its really not your _fault_. I shouldn’t say it like that.”

“All of this,” she said, because things were distant right now, with him being… but she’d thought _they_ were ok?

“I mean if you’d been on the helicarrier doing your real job like Shield trained you for I probably wouldn’t be in this whole mess, would I?” Phil said gently.

It wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought a thousand times, when she’d heard he was dead, at his funeral, when she’d been told he was alive, when he was losing his mind to alien compulsions, a few days ago hearing he was dying. Her heart still lurched in her chest to hear him just say it like that.

“I thought you could handle it when I sent you in, in Bahrain, but everyone has limits, even you. I knew it’d been bad when I saw you with the body, but I have to admit I did think you’d come back from it quicker.”

“I… I _couldn’t_ …”

“I get that. I do. It just wasn’t what I expected from you, hiding in admin like that. But, you’ve never been very predictable, have you May?”

She stared at him. She recognized every line of his face, every dark fleck in his eyes. His voice was calm and his expression was warm looking at her.

Why did it feel like she’d never seen him before.

“I guess I’ll go ahead and admit I was pissed when we talked about getting together before, when we were younger, and then you just decided I wasn’t what you wanted, who you wanted. You didn’t even bother to tell me. But we still worked together, and it was a good team, so it was worth putting that aside.”

May swallowed. “You never said..”

“Why would I tell _you_ that?” and for the first time he sounded upset.

There wasn’t a single word left in her head.

“Why would I confide in you like that after everything? I went to you with every fear, that whole nightmare of what had really happened to me when I “died” and you used that to send better reports behind my back.”

“You know why I did it Phil. You _know_ that.”

“What is it I “know” May?”

“You know I…” but he was watching her patiently and she couldn’t get the words out.

“We both know you were there because you’d be fast enough to kill me if I lost it and Nick didn’t want to get his hands dirty. We both know you’re capable of it.”

“I…”

“It’s ok May. I know you.”

He did. He knew every last horrible thing she was capable of. She’d just, thought he’d thought a little better of her than this.

“We got past it while we needed to. And for what it’s worth, I am sorry I couldn’t really forgive you for it. I wanted to, but we’ve never really been who we were before, have we?”

She shook her head without a sound.

Phil leaned a little heavier against the wall, looking kind of sad. May didn’t want to know what her face looked like right now.

“I guess I just want things to be honest between us for once. Since it’s been so long and my clocks running out. I thought maybe a fresh start for us would change things, but. We don’t really have time for all that anymore.”

May felt that quiver in her jaw, her eyes stinging, but that would have to be for later. “I’m not going to let you just die without a fight, without even trying. I’ll find something. Anything.”

So they weren’t what she’d thought they were. They weren’t going where she’d thought they’d been. That was a problem for later. She still couldn’t just watch him die like this. Her job still came first, even if she’d failed before.

“Anything,” he said, and she froze because that was the dangerous voice, that one tone so quiet and soft and lethal and he’d never, ever turned it on her before.

“Phil…”

Slowly, gently, Phil leaned into her space and turned her by the shoulder, pinning her back to the wall with his left hand light across her collar bones.

“I’m not allowed to die. Is that it May? You own me now, just like Shield decided they did? It’s _now_ you want to be selfish, now you want me all to yourself, whatever the cost? But its still not because you want me, there’s just nobody else left who doesn’t see you as anything other than a black box. You just need me around because I remember who you used to be underneath all this, right?”

“That’s not… Phil, no.”

The others didn’t think of her like that, not the ones she’d been around so long, the ones she’d trained. Maybe at first, they must have, but not still, right? They knew she wasn’t just…

“Well just how much is it you think I should suffer for it Melinda? Just so you can have that? Cause I’ll tell you right now Agent May, you knock me out, put me under so one more person can cut into me when I don’t want it _again_ I’ll hate you forever.”

He didn’t yell. Phil yelled so rarely. But something seemed dead behind his eyes and she knew he meant every word he was saying.

In that moment something cracked.

*

It wasn’t a raised voice that caught his attention, but it was an angry one. They didn’t have enough time or manpower to waste on squabbling, especially with the dimensional rift due to act up again. Phil’s first thought seeing someone with May pinned to the wall was they had a mole. Why she hadn’t taken them down yet was irrelevant. He made a quick, silent approach because this was a disable first deal with later kind of situation and May wasn’t moving.

When he finally recognized the side of his own head it all got easy. This was some dimensional nightmare and it wasn’t allowed to be here.

It was easy to snap his own neck and watch the body turn to smoke while it fell.

But May made a horrible little sound of protest, stared down after it as it faded to nothing.

“May? What was all that?”

May said nothing. Didn’t even move.

“May? May, it’s me,” Phil said, but he was noticing how pale she was, her wet eyes, how she stayed shivering with her back against the wall, staring at the patch of floor where the fake body vanished.

His copy, his evil copy apparently, had been holding her against the wall, had been angry with her maybe? He’d seen a bit of that sneer on his own face he’d only ever used in interrogation.

That wasn’t what his fears about himself looked like, the creepy government drone act had never been a big problem for him, so was this somehow one of May’s? Since when was May scared of him being angry with her? She’d never had a problem letting him know when she was pissed with _him_ , had that particular skill of only saying _sir_ when she meant _you dumbfuck_.

“May, look at me. This is me, I’m fine. I’m still right here,” he said softly, wanting to reach out to her but it seemed like a bad move just now.

It hurt watching how it took her multiple tries to meet his eyes because she’d only ever done that once.

“Melinda? It’s ok, whatever that was, it wasn’t real…”

It was less than a blink and she’d flung herself against him, both arms around his neck, on her tiptoes and scrabbling to balance on top of his shoes and squirm closer.

His arm went around her back on instinct, the other coming up seconds later to pet her shoulder. “Hey, hey. Everything’s alright. That wasn’t me. What was he…”

But May made a quiet, low keening sound before she started to cry in near-silent wracking shudders, the broken-hearted sobbing he’d only ever seen from her twice.

Phil held her tighter, cradled the back of her head where she’d buried her face in his shoulder. “It’s ok. Hey May? May, it’s ok. Come here.”

The numb places in his chest were bigger every day, but Phil could feel his heart racing. He knew how much it took to make May cry like this.

“Mel, what the hell did you let me _do_?” he asked, but it was mostly to himself. He knew May was crying too hard to speak. He could feel it.

There was a crate he’d seen somewhere nearby, around a corner or two. Phil crouched down enough to get his arm behind her legs, lift up until he had her bent knees close to his body. She’d never been hard to carry. Usually she hated being picked up without warning, but right now she coiled around him tight, arms around his shoulders and both knees tucking in tight over his right hip.

It was always random memories that jumped into the brain in moments like this, when everything else was reeling. Phil could remember carrying her back to campus piggyback after she’d turned 21 like it was yesterday.

He sat down carefully and kept her in his lap, letting his torso sway just a little. “Deep breaths, ok Mel? I’m right here. We’re ok, I promise.”

“How much _longer_ ,” she choked out between still too shallow breaths.

_Oh Mel_. “I’m not in a hurry to go Mel. I’m still here. I’m still here for now. I’ve got you.”

Her fist clung so tight in the back of his jacket the fabric pulled around his arms.

Phil wanted to tell her she didn’t need him, that she had so much life left in front of her, people here who loved her and needed her, how much good she and Daisy could accomplish together but now wasn’t the time for that talk.

Unfortunately it would have to be soon.

He just held her tight mostly in silence and tried not to imagine what not-him could have possibly said to cause this.

May stopped crying all at once, like flicking a switch, something that had always scared him because it was never because she was cried out, she just decided she was done getting to.

She moved in his arms, tucked her chin over his shoulder and unclenched her fist from his jacket, scrubbing her gloved palm over her face. Then she shifted and getting to hold her was done, off of his lap and out of his arms, a damp patch on his shirt from her tears and a whole different kind of numb in his chest.

They sat in tense silence for a moment in the empty hallway. No one else had come down her. No one had seen any of this. Phil was only half grateful for it. If he hadn’t been walking down here…

“Did he say something to you May?” The answer was obvious, but he wanted to give her the opening if she was ready for it.

She shrugged where she sat next to him, thighs still touching while she stared sightlessly at the floor. He wanted to rub her injured leg. It had to ache. She was overdoing the PT like she always did. Phil sighed, one hand rubbing circles across her shoulders while they sat in silence, but it was his left and he couldn’t even feel her there under his palm.

Eventually she stood and walked away without a sound.

*

Phil woke up nose to nose with May that night.

He didn’t scream or head-butt her out of long, long practice. She’d spider-legged herself onto the bed on knuckles and toes without waking him, her body held up off of his. She’d done it before. Closed doors that should have creaked were never an issue for her.

“May? You want under the blankets?” he asked in a drowsy rasp. There were two ways this usually went. She said whatever she’d been wanting to say and went back to her own space or she climbed in with him and flopped down near his back.

She did neither.

May pulled the blankets loose and climbed under in front of him, immediately clinging tight with all four limbs, both arms around his waist, a leg over his hips and the other thrust between, twined to cling around the back of his calve, her face hidden against his chest just like before.

His first flash of thought was just how _good_ it felt to be held, how right it felt to curl his arm around her shoulders, how easy it would be to rub her back and bend to kiss her dark head, breathe in the faint and familiar trace of her sweat.

But that was only a flicker. She was still breathing deliberately, like it hurt, faint shivers running through every limb like that time she’d had to stay awake almost three days. It stung that it was some warped version of him that had shaken her so badly, but that wasn’t a problem for right now.

Phil pulled the sheet up around her shoulders more and let her cling, let his thumb pet over a lock of her hair. He wasn’t expecting her to speak and when she did it was so quiet it was hard to hear, even with her tucked so close.

“He said…”

Oh no.

“He said you hated me for a while when we didn’t get together when we were younger, that I was always there for you except when it really mattered, that you never forgave me for watching you on the Bus, you just wished you did, and I was never really me again after, after I, anyways so it was fine to ignore it because you just needed me to work, you didn’t li… anymore. And if I’d just done my job in the first place we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”

Her voice shook, but her tone was steady, mission report steady, which only made this worse. It was not an exaggeration when Phil thought that this felt worse than dying. It was just fact. “May that’s not true. None of that’s true. I’d _never_ … That’s not… why would you _listen_ to that?”

“Maybe not all of it, but…”

“No! May…” He tried to sit up, but she wouldn’t let go.

“You wouldn’t be dying right now if I’d just _been there in the first place_ ,” and now there was that strained edge in her voice where she wanted to scream and just couldn’t let herself, “if I’d done what I was actually trained for instead of…”

“May damnit it’s not your job to just…”

“We both know what the hell I’m good for,” she snarled at him, but it was a wounded little sound.

“Melinda, how long have you been thinking like this?” because May had always been more willing to throw herself on the grenade than he’d ever been able to handle, but this… this was something else.

“Talk to me May. _Please_.”

But she shook her head, face still pressed into his chest and it was an honest thread of terror that made him shove hand and elbow under her shoulders, yank her lose from clutching at him until they were face to face in the dark.

Her cheek was damp under his palm when he leaned in forehead to forehead. “Listen to me. Watch me talk and you listen.” She didn’t nod, but he could see her eyes through the dark, the tear tracks on her face.

“The only thing I’ve ever needed from you, the only thing I’ve ever _had to have_ is you happy and a part of my life. Ok? Everything else is just _details_.”

Nothing showed on her face or in her eyes when she was usually so easy for him to read, so familiar.

“If you’d been on the helicarrier I’d have sent you to back up Natasha. I am _glad_ you weren’t on the boat, because you’re faster than me and _this_ did not need to be you. You’ve been my best friend for so long and there’ve been so many years where you were the only family I had. Andrew adored you and you guys wanted a houseful and I wish you’d gotten to have all that, that life. I do. All the time. If you’d been happy in admin I’d have made sure you stayed there, but you weren’t happy May. You were just… And there isn’t a day I don’t regret not being more careful with that ledger, not paying more attention to, all of it. Andrew was halfway gone as soon as terrigenesis happened, we know that now, but that was months of pain you shouldn’t have had to go through and I am so sorry.”

She was staring back at him with wet eyes, not blinking, barely a few inches away and still clutching him with her leg, but she felt so far from him right then.

“Am I lying Melinda?”

“No,” she said, less than a whisper.

Phil let himself brush her damp cheek with his thumb. “Do you believe me?”

Silently she tucked her face down into his shoulder, wrapped her arm back around his neck. It broke his heart when she didn’t say yes, a far worse ache in his chest than he’d already been carrying, but he bit back the grimace that wanted to creep over his face.

Phil kissed her hair, her forehead, the thin skin at her temple and just above her ear. “Guess you needed to hear some of that a long time ago, huh? There hasn’t really been the right moment.”

He could feel her silent, deliberate breathing where she pressed along him, her belly against his ribs.

“You know I was always happier as a field agent. You know I never wanted to be the director anymore than you wanted to deal with commander. But, I missed you all the time. And it wasn’t like I started thinking about it in so many words, but I started reaching out to you more, I guess seeing what you were comfortable with, because so much had changed and it had started to seem like a _maybe_ we should consider again.”

Silence.

“Then the LMD, she thought she _was_ you I think. She didn’t quite understand some of the situation, and I didn’t notice whatever signs must have been there because I thought we were in such a good place. I thought you were safe, with me. But she’d been flirting back and then we kissed, I kissed her and it… and then she put a gun to my head. So. I couldn’t believe anything she said about what you wanted, because you’d never do that to me.”

Still silence. Phil let himself start rubbing his palm over her back, her slender spine and strong shoulders, still quivering faintly like she’d never really stopped since he’d found her in the hallway. He sighed heavily. “When I said we should sit down with another bottle of scotch and hash it all out, later, I really didn’t think this much was going to happen.”

May was obviously done moving or speaking for the day. He couldn’t blame her knowing what had, what he’d… Phil shifted the pillow a little more under their heads, leaned away from her just enough it didn’t feel like she’d smother herself. He felt the faint pressure of her forehead back against his chest.

“If you can’t believe me right now, that’s ok. Please believe this. I love you. I loved you when we were kids at the academy with our whole lives ahead of us and I love you just the way you are now and you have never made me believe you didn’t care about me. No matter what you decide or where we go from here, that will never change. Ok? There isn’t a minute of my life that I spent with you that I wasted.”

In halting little motions, he felt her hand fist itself around the back of his t-shirt.

He kissed the dark top of her head again. “We’re gonna be alright.”

Phil watched the dark shape of her breathing until he finally fell asleep with his fingers twisted in her hair, so he’d know when she pulled away.

*

Melinda watched him sleep and tried to believe it, any of it.

It was hard. Loyalty and love were two different things and one of them was a lot easier to believe in than the other.

And she hadn’t told him the last thing fake him had said.

She wouldn’t make him suffer. Couldn’t. Not like T.A.H.I.T.I. had made him suffer, _never_ like that. Fury had been shrewd enough not to tell her until all of that was over, because she and Phil had the kind of pact sworn in blood to smother each other if there was ever nothing left for one of them but to be a vegetable in some hospital bed. Him losing himself due to the GH hadn’t counted.

But he shouldn’t be dying right now. It wasn’t _right_.

So if the only way to save him was Deathlok tech than she would find it. If it was Kree, she’d lure one here and kill it. If the answer was a new heart and left lung than she would murder someone to get him one and not regret it near as much as she should. She was already a murderer anyways. She already knew where she was going when she died. If he insisted on laying down to die without a fight, she would ice him and never ever apologize.

Maybe that shade version had been more honest than Phil wanted to tell her. Maybe he would hate her forever, even if saving him now wasn’t the torture it’d been the first time, even if she could get him the life he should have had in the first place, even if he could be healthy again without the instability or the pain.

May had already lived through the idea of him hating her twice.

She could do it again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up with this whole fic in my head earlier this week and blocked it out, it's just taken me this long to fill it in. I know lots of us had this idea, (fear dimension is just too tempting) but I've tried to avoid reading the other takes on it until I finished this just in case. I'm going to go read all those now.
> 
> One of May's emotional themes this season is her self-doubt in regards to her role on the team and in the lives of those she cares about when she can't be the kind of 'protector' she is used to being. I still think that theme is going to pay off later with May having more emotional security and self confidence off of the battlefield so to speak. 
> 
> In this fic she does not have that yet. I owe May a brand new jet plane at this point.
> 
> Please offer me all your thoughts and tears and thrown tomatoes.


End file.
